âIn the Nazi death camp of Sobibor in Eastern Poland, knitting saved several Jewish women from deathâ
With the Nazi forces rounding up Jews and anyone else they deemed âunworthyâ, they had en...

Textile historian and weaver Ruth Gilbert is hosting an Early Modern Stocking Study Day on Saturday 24th March 2018, from 10am to 4pm, at the Loft Space, Britannia Mills, Huddersfield www.facebook.com/theloftspaceBritanniaMills/. Ruth is covering the evidence for early knitted stockings and its interpretation as well as knitting techniques, tools and yarn. A must for anyone interested in both the history as well as the practical reproduction of Early Modern knitted stockings.

Category: Research

Delegates at the recent Knitting History Forum Conference in London will remember Chrystel Bandenburgh of Leiden University mentioned a forthcoming knitting history initiative in the Netherlands on seventeenth century stocking-knitting. The Textile Research Centre (TRC) Leiden have now announced their exciting new research project. Starting from January 2018 they will lead an investigation into seventeenth century knitted silk stockings, focussing on the examples recovered in 2014 near the island of Texel, from a shipwreck believed to have sunk c.1640.

The finely-knitted silk stockings have received initial conservation treatment and are the inspiration for the project, which seeks to discover more information, including how the stockings were originally constructed, if they were custom-made and how they were worn. Through a series of practical workshops and lectures at the TRC Leiden, participants will attempt to create reconstructions using very fine silk thread and knitting needles.

The TRC invite knitters to participate in this important project. The first workshop will be held in February 2018, led by Chrystel Brandenburgh and Lies van de Wege (TRC volunteer), and a second two-day workshop will be held in March, with regular progress meetings to follow. Materials and equipment will be supplied and while expertise in knitting stockings would be beneficial, it is not necessary, though with 1mm knitting needles this may not be a project for the faint-hearted! Interested knitters should email info@trc-leiden.nl directly describing their knitting skills. Further information is available on the Textile Research Centre Leiden website.

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Strickersvej – Knitters Way is hosting a seminar in August to discuss the KEME project and its findings. There will be speakers on topics ranging from early modern knitted stockings from burials in Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia, 3D modelling, the significance of the spin angle in knitted fabric, knitted items in the Design Museum, Eramus’s caps and comparing sheep fleece characteristics as well as workshops and broader discussions on the KEME project and citizen or crowd-sourced science.

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Shetland Museum and Archives are hosting a free study day on Saturday 5 March 2016, from 10:00am – 4:00pm. “Authenticity in Culturally-Based Knitting” will be the last event from the programme “Knitting in the Round: Hand-Knitted Textiles and the Economy of Craft in Scotland”.

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Mary Hawkins, a long-standing member of Knitting History Forum, has spoken more than once at KHF conferences and meetings on framework and machine knitting, still a mainstay of the modern garment industry. She also volunteers at the Framework Knitters Museum in Ruddington. Mary has kindly offered us a very brief tour through the history of machine knitting, from William Lee’s invention of the knitting frame in 1589, to the technological advances of the post-war period. A Short History of Machine Knitting is available to read in the Resources section.

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A new interdisciplinary research project will be taking a closer look at early knitted caps. The Centre for Textile Research or CTR in Copenhagen and Dr Jane Malcolm-Davies of The Tudor Tailor have been awarded a prestigious Marie SkÅodowska-Curie Fellowship for “Knitting in the Early Modern Era: materials, manufacture and meaning“, or KEME. Based at the University of Copenhagen, the KEME team will be investigating in detail more than one hundred extant knitted caps from the Early Modern period, submitting them for technical examination and analysis, compiling an economic map of early knitting and clarifying terminology as a basis for future research to build upon. A database will be developed to make the information gathered in the project available online.

Jane will be speaking on “A knitting revolution? A scientific survey of sixteenth century knitted caps” at the Knitting History Forum Conference 2015 in London, Saturday 14th November. Her paper will introduce KEME and she will be appealing for knitters, volunteers and collaborators to participate in the project. A blog, Facebook page and Ravelry group called Strickersvej (Knitters Way) are to launch in November.